Having been proclaimed as dead, then only partially-so, Intel’s “Larrabee” project has finally sprouted into something with an eye on commercial release.  Intel have announced a new high-performance chip, codenamed “Knights Corner”, built on 22nm processes and packing more than 50 cores; they envisage the Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) chips being used for massively parallel computing, similar to NVIDIA’s CUDA system

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Larrabee promised to squeeze between eight and 48 individual cores onto a single chip, and was intended as a rival to GPUs that could be repurposed to support CPU crunching.  Complex software could allow for dynamically adjusted pipelines and task scheduling

Intel are currently shipping a development kit – called Knights Ferry – to select developers, with broader availability of the software tools expected in the second half of this year.  No word on when we could expect a commercial MIC release